A Thousand Images
by newcitylights
Summary: "He has a memory of her from years ago. It's bright and pink, though he knows that can't be true, because in it she's sitting at a table in a dingy, dull bunker, brown sweater, no sunlight, no warmth, and yet – he feels it, the rays of the sun." [Future Wyatt deals with a few demons. Lucy/Wyatt. Post 2x10]


_"I have a thousand images of you in an hour: all different and all coming back to the same. I think of you once against a sky line: and on the hill that Sunday morning. The light and the shadow and quietness and the rain and the wood. And you. Your arms and lips and hair and shoulders and voice – you."_

– **_Rupert Brooke_**

He has a memory of her from years ago. It's bright and pink, though he knows that can't be true, because in it she's sitting at a table in a dingy, dull bunker, brown sweater, no sunlight, no warmth, and _yet_ – he feels it, the rays of the sun, a bright, hopeful yellow. He sees her reading, biting down on her lip, fingernails drumming a rhythm on her mug of tea. He's sitting across from her. She pushes back to get up, fingers marking her place in a dense nonfiction, and the chair snags, she sputters, tilts backwards with a _"yeesh!"_ and then catches herself. Saved. It happens quickly and he leans forward on instinct, _"are you okay?"_ And she laughs, a hearty cackle that reverberates around the room and vibrates in his chest, and she turns to him and smiles and wouldn't you know - there were all the lights from the Chicago World's Fair, right there in that kitchen, and there was that warmth on his skin.

He sees her now, black sweater, long hair, wide stares. He doesn't ever think of her like this. He doesn't let himself. The crimson of fresh bruises, the glassy, sorrowful eyes, the weight of sadness and grief and anger piled on by his actions pulling at her shoulders. To travel to this hades in his mind, this hell where she suffered at his hand, would be to inflict upon himself punishment, to torture himself endlessly, and so he never does, if he can avoid it.

"Promise me you won't get caught up in it," she had said a few nights ago, or five years from now, as she ran her fingers across his shoulders, down his arms, cocooned with him in bed.

"I won't," he replied, his voice low with the fatigue of a late night conversation, and he sounded sure, confident, and yet there's something else. "It's not about us anyway."

"Yeah," she drew out, flicking her eyes down from his face, and back up again. "It's just, knowing what we're going back to, what _they'll_ be going through, I just, I dunno, I don't want you to –"

"Lucy." He stopped her. She looked back up at him, his hand moved up under her chin. "We can do this. We're good. Just keep reminding me." He smiled, and she mirrored it a bit, a reassurance through a familiar smirk, and he pulled her the rest of the way to him, so soft and alive and _Lucy_. He knew what she feared, that the quicksand of guilt would smother him slowly, that he'd lose a bit of himself in the freefall of blame that might sweep him up when he saw their younger selves, so pained and broken and severed. But her hand fit so nicely into his, her breath was so warm on his neck, and he thought he'd make that his north star, his anchor to tether him, that he could handle it, no problem, knowing what he has now.

And she ran through his mind again that night, flicking through his subconscious when he was not quite yet dreaming, a different memory in a different time. She's standing in front of him, drenched down to her petticoats, in a room above a tavern in Seneca Falls in 1848. He is laughing with her as he tries to help untie and undo all her layers, peeling back each one with teases of _"my gosh there's more!"_ and _"this has to be it, I know it."_ And her cheeks are bright and his face hurts from smiling and she's practically shot out of a canon, invigorated from the rain that soaked them both, hurriedly chattering on with _"she's going to lead the women's suffrage movement for years, Wyatt, decades! And I spoke to her!"_ and then later _"did you see Frederick Douglass? He's here too."_ And she kisses him recklessly, skirts and bonnets abandoned, wet and wild and full of life, and he remembers thinking not of everything he's lost in the years on this mission, but of this, her - his excited, star struck, beautiful nerd, this wildfire in his heart, the greatest thing he's gained.

That image and feeling is pushed aside now, replaced by the one before him. She's in front of him, mouth slightly agape, a cleaner cut version of himself off to her right. And it's different than he thought it would be, harder than even the hardest feeling he imagined, to see themselves, him and her, in the hours after the world caught fire and split open, in the moments after they lost their friend and he gave voice to the feeling that had so thoroughly filled up the empty spaces inside of him. He looks to Lucy – his Lucy – frequently, if only to keep himself from staring at _her_ , because that way leads to madness, regret, heartbreak. But the memories flick around his mind like ghosts as they talk to these melancholy versions of themselves, the way she use to flinch when he touched her, the way she avoided his eyes, the way the air between them was leaded, thick, dense with unnecessary anger. He feels it now, between them, around him.

Its hours later and they're getting ready for bed, pushing two cots together, making themselves back at home after sharing as much information and detailing as much of their plan to their alternate timeline doppelgangers as both had agreed was necessary for right now. She's rooting through draws and fluffing up pillows, a bit of an energizer bunny on a cleaning spree. She teases him a little with "I forgot how handsome you are clean shaven," tossing him a smirk as she smoothes out the sheets.

He bounces it back with a bit of mock indignation. "I thought you liked the beard." She grins and pulls a tee shirt over her head, but he falls silent for a bit as she settles herself back against the mattress. He pulls off his shoes, and then, as if spirited away in thought, sits for a moment, unmoving, stoic.

She waits a beat, watches his back. Then reaches out, her hand ghosting across his shoulder. "Don't brood." She caught him. She was good at that.

He turns his head ever so slightly towards her in acknowledgement, then back. "I'm not."

"This seems like brooding."

He turns around now, facing her. "No brooding, I promise." He reaches for her hand, gives it a bit of a shake, then brings it up to his lips quickly.

She sits up a bit in bed. "You said you'd be able to handle this." Her tone has shifted now, the gentle teasing evaporating, her voice becoming softer, sweeter, laced with the delicate threads of concern.

"And I am handling it." He looks up from where he'd been staring, finding her eyes. His voice sounds solid, confident. But he sees her skepticism. He's always been bad at bluffing her.

"It's bothering you."

He waits a beat. She moves a bit closer to him. "Wyatt," she whispers, her hand entwining with his, and it feels so much like coming home, her skin against his, the black coffee of her voice; so much has changed in the intervening years, they've both been hardened, forged in fire even more than they were before, and yet so much is the same – her easy, light touches, the way she hands him a lifeline, pulls him to shore; the way he lets her.

He thinks about all those nights he spent without her, running down the rabbit hole of grief and responsibility and willful ignorance. He thinks about all those months after, the months that are actually still to come for these versions of themselves, where she kept a watchful distance, gun-shy, an understandable reticence in her conversations with him; where his arms ached from not being able to touch her, where he lost sleep wondering if he'd ever be worthy of her affection. He breaks open. "I hurt you so badly."

She doesn't hesitate. "You aren't him."

He scoffs a bit and raises an eyebrow because that seems to be the whole point, that he's him and they are them and this is all a four act play in deja-vu.

She rolls her eyes ever so slightly, levity mixed with seriousness, and sits up fully, pulling herself to him, her hands on his arms, his shoulders, his face. She seems urgent almost, as if checking for wounds after a fire fight. She looks at him clearly, her voice no longer tinged with the molasses of sleep. Instead she's assertive. "You aren't now."

She closes the miniscule distance between them, kissing him fiercely, on the forehead, the cheek, the lips, trying to will her reassurance on him through touch. He wraps his arms around her, she burrows her face into his neck, and he clings to her like she's rescue at sea. In his mind he sees her face from those years ago, the face down the hall, battered and tired and unsure. "What is she thinking right now?"

"Wyatt," she sighs, almost like a plea. "It's not important now."

"Lucy," is his only response, the only one he needs.

She looks at him a little helplessly, so reluctant to give in, but so unfathomably understanding of his heart, of his feelings, of his past; and it stuns him, the deep well of goodness in her, and she sits there looking at him, ready to pull him back from the edge of the cliff once again, to be a lighthouse in a storm.

"I loved you the whole time, I could never stop, can never stop, you know that." She takes his face in her hands, smiling a bit, kissing him again, like she's done a million times, like she couldn't all those years before. She sighs into him, soft but sure. "We moved so far past this, so far past this."

He feels it stop then, the gale force winds that were battering his heart just moments before, and he feels himself relax into her, nodding, sighing into her skin, smooth and cool and _her_. He doesn't move though, not till she does, pulling back to stare at him, the harvest moons of her eyes finding his. And in that moment he doesn't see bruises or tears or heartbreak, doesn't remember pain and anger and guilt. Instead he sees something else – her hands reaching for him at the sound of a gunshot; her red cheeks and slurred speech from six shots of whiskey in 1877 Deadwood, Dakota Territory; her face that cold night in 1948 when he couldn't wait another moment, when he just had to ask her then and there if she thought maybe she'd marry him.

"We're good," she reminds him, then he chuckles a bit against her. And they fall asleep like that, tied up in each other, the way they've done so many times before, the way that they will so many times to come.

And the next morning when he sees her, still fractured and bruised, she's making coffee for herself, tapping her fingers on the counter in a way that gives away her nerves, her unease. She looks at him and raises an eyebrow, flicking her gaze down to her cup, then over to the pantry. Would he like some? He understands her and he nods. She grabs another mug and fills it up, and it's so mundane, so extraordinarily dull this routine, but he can't stop watching her, the way she moves, the way the robe falls around her frame, the way her long hair curls around her face in a way he hasn't seen in a while, in a way he didn't know he missed.

She hands him the coffee, and he nods his thanks. A moment passes, then she speaks. "I like the beard," she says a little quietly, and there's a tint to her voice, a playful severity that he recognizes immediately, and he lets out a laugh.

He takes her cue, tosses it back. "I know you do." Then she smiles at him, a light filling her face, so real and whole and so like the ones he sees every day now, like the one he saw last night.

And he feels it again, the warmth, the brightness; sees civil war fireworks, all the flashbulbs of Hollywood, sees her jump into his arms and say " _yes_."

 _fin._


End file.
